Whole Diets 237quite justified, after having drawn attention to the other side of the picture, in
once more quoting King. He was, after all, Chief of the Division of Soil Manage-
ment in the US Department of Agriculture, and as such a qualified observer,
recording facts as he found them. The references to the ‘Medical Testament’ con-
tain an admirable summary of King’s findings, and it is from that document that
the following account is taken.
King frequently inserts into his pages the cheerful, vigorous and healthy appearance of
the Chinese lower classes, the Shanghai coolies, ‘fully the equal of large Americans in
frame, but without surplus flesh’; ‘their great endurance’, ‘both sexes are agile, wiry, and
strong’ (Hong Kong); ‘lithe, sinewy forms, bright eyes and cheerful faces, particularly
among the women, young and old’ (Canton); ‘everywhere we went in China the labour-
ing people appeared healthy and contented, and showed clearly that they were well
nourished’. Cheerfulness is, indeed, common to those peasantries who follow the old
agricultural ways.
The average of seven Chinese holdings ... indicates a maintenance capacity of
1783 people, 212 cattle or donkeys and 399 swine – 1995 consumers and 399 rough
food transformers per square mile of farmland. These statements for China represent
strictly rural populations. The rural population of the US in 1900 was placed at 61 per
square mile of improved farm land and there were 30 horses and mules...
They [the Chinese] have long realized that much time is required to transform
organic matter into forms available for plant food, and, although they are the heaviest
users in the world, the largest portion of this organic matter is predigested with soil or
subsoil before it is applied to the fields. This is at an enormous cost of human time and
labour, but it practically lengthens their growing season and enables them to adopt a
system of multiple cropping which would not otherwise be possible. By planting in hills
and rows with intertillage it is very common to see three crops growing upon the same
field at one time, but in different stages of maturity – one nearly ready to harvest, one
just coming up, and the third at the stage when it is drawing most heavily on the soil.This disposes of the theory that increased production and heavy cropping have
been responsible in this country for our diseases in crops. The Chinese have been
cropping in this way for 40 centuries.
The Chinese manure or compost is made of everything that can be collected which once
got its life from the soil, directly or indirectly. They are mixed together until they form
a black friable substance which is readily spread upon the fields. King describes a number
of different processes he saw in different parts of China. One he describes as being car-
ried out in compost pits at the edge of a canal, a process entailing ‘tremendous labour of
body and amount of forethought’. For months before his visit men had brought waste
from the stables of Shanghai, a distance of 15 miles by water. This they had deposited
upon the canal bank between layers of thin mud dipped from the canal, corresponding to
silt collected in and taken from the recesses in the Hunza aqueducts, and left to ferment.
The eight men at King’s visit had nearly filled the compost pit with this stable refuse and